Huszár
by Masked Man 2
Summary: "The storm had broken ten minutes ago. Although that was putting it rather catastrophically. On the whole the sky's wrath built slowly, more lazy than ominous in Florence's mind. Yet the tension in the room seemed something living, passing her rudely by to curl around Freddie's rigid form like an unwelcome lover."


**AN: Hello, fellows! I became a fan of** _ **Chess**_ **very recently, and still can't claim to have actually SEEN a production of this fascinating musical, having merely a passing familiarity with productions other than the 2001 Danish cast recording (brilliant, brilliant, brilliant). After lurking around the fandom for awhile, this little idea randomly came into my head about a month ago (on which day it did actually start thunderstorming from midnight to 1 in the morning, and said thunderstorm did actually wake me up). So...pre-musical: bit of weird introspection, bit of fluff. Enjoy?**

 **I suppose I should warn you off slight allusions to mental illness, but we all know Freddie's a bit cracked.**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own** _ **Chess**_ **in any of its iterations.**

The storm had broken ten minutes ago. Although that was putting it rather catastrophically. In actuality it was just the rain, which had begun to fall ten minutes ago, barely audible as it brushed millions of glass windows. Two rather pitiful growls of thunder in the interim: spaced roughly five minutes apart, still too far away to startle the city from the midnight quiet. On the whole the sky's wrath built slowly, more lazy than ominous in Florence's mind. Yet the tension in the room seemed something living, passing her rudely by to curl around Freddie's rigid form like an unwelcome lover.

She ought to have known it'd be unrealistic to hope he'd sleep through it. For all his paranoia, he wasn't truly _afraid_ of much. Abandonment, sure, but she couldn't in good conscience blame him for that. Losing the game, his sole obsessive satisfaction; cable cars, because he did nothing sans eccentricity. His mind- those voices telling him God knew what when she wasn't around to quiet them. And storms. It was so normal a thing alongside the rest, so mundane, that she'd laughed aloud the first time she saw him jump like a spooked cat at a flash of lightning; not her most empathetic moment, but then, she was no saint, no matter what Freddie believed. At any rate, he'd bluffed his way out of that one- had tried to do the same for a full month's worth of good old London rain afterward until she'd snapped and told him to _just bloody admit it, for Christ's sake, it's not a sin to be scared._

She was patient by necessity, not by natural inclination. And _necessity_ was a rather difficult thing to justify when one's partner's only candid moments came when he was either exhausted, drunk, or cowering at the edge of psychosis.

Freddie, of course, would insist that the storms themselvesdidn't bother him worth a damn. _Nature throwing a shit fit_ , he'd say in that cavalier way of his: by all appearances effortlessly sure of himself and the workings of the world, when she knew he was anything but. _The water cycle, or storm cycle, or some fucking cycle- Goddammit, Florence, you expect me to remember that fucking elementary school shit?_ Oh, he could pretend well enough. To a point. But when things got bad, outside or in, there was no disguising that high, strangled note of fear jarring his voice, the feverish gleam in his eyes that made him seem every inch the head case the press revelled in painting him as.

Maybe the storms themselves didn't perturb him, no, but what they wrought? The noise, the light, the chaos of it all? It was the journalists and fans on a cosmic scale, and even on good days he would grow twitchy and restless as those encounters dragged on. He had never handled unpredictability well. De Courcey had once dismissed it as a "childhood problem"; even if she hadn't known Freddie as well as she did, she'd have been surprised at how gross an understatement that was. Stability and control were of great moment to a child, as much as or more than love. Every day she couldn't help but be grateful that the second mirrored not the player in that she had grown up lacking only two of three.

It worried her sometimes, how thin the veneer of sanity ran. More so now when, either thinking himself unobserved or having passed the point of caring, he made no effort to hide the terror that gripped him as the storm ran its course unremittingly. He lay curled in a tight ball, hands clasped behind his head and forearms locked over his ears, a fearful little boy trapped in a man's body. The sight was pitiful. Her foster father would've called it pathetic (had it been anyone else in this vulnerable position Freddie would have agreed wholeheartedly with that assessment), but he was a hard man; to him emotion was a woman's luxury. Never mind that Freddie sometimes said the same, he'd say just about anything in the heat of the moment. It was to her discredit, perhaps, that she didn't find that as offensive as she was entitled to. And in the lonely void of night he was more burnt bulb than live wire, stripped of those protective layers of affectation, aggression, derision, leaving behind only the shell of the child. The child that, despite everything, she couldn't help but love.

"Freddie," she whispered, cautiously placing a hand on his shoulder. A flash of lightning lit the room, two interminable seconds of electric white that made her teeth ache. Thunder crashed, so loudly even she could scarce forbear from jumping. He flinched violently, almost convulsively, knocking her solicitous hand away with one flailing arm. She knew without looking at him that he had buried his face in the pillow, biting his wrist in a fruitless attempt to muffle harsh, panicked gasps for stolen breath. His spare frame trembled with exhaustion. Not that she was surprised, really. Maintaining that level of vigilance for an hour or more running would take a toll on any man, and Freddie had never been a particularly impressive specimen in either the physical or mental sense. As uncharitable a thought as it was. But she had dispensed with charity years ago.

More lightning. More thunder. Rain lashing the world in a fury.

With a quiet sigh, Florence reached out to him again, this time daring only to touch the hand closest to her own. His knuckles ground hard and sharp against her fingers as she stroked softly raised veins, coarse hairs, the permanently swollen scabs ground a nail-bitten decade into his skin. She could have said any number of things to him- _it's just a storm, just a hand, just_ me- all of them worthless. He wouldn't listen. Couldn't. What good were _words_ when tormented nature drowned out all?

At least he didn't try to escape. If anything, he seemed to wilt a little beneath her touch: not so much grateful relaxation as boneless collapse, but still the first positive step of the hour. It was a constant gamble, discerning whether he needed her to be of comfort or to force him to own his shit. She couldn't quite bring herself to mind the former tonight; she had time aplenty to push him during daylight hours less fraught with tension. Thunder rolled, softly, the sky groaning out its sighs above them as she massaged a thumb across Freddie's calloused palm. Lightning flashed three times in as many minutes, and in the unnatural brightness images danced behind her eyes, dim at the edges where the lines between memory and invention blurred.

 _The old flat in Budapest: cold bare floor, cracked ceiling, peeling wallpaper yellowed with cigarette smoke and age, everything brown and gray and a dingy tired white. Herself, a plump toddler still, sitting on her father's lap with his strong arm keeping her from wriggling away as he pointed to the chestnut-and-peach patterned board with his three-fingered right hand._ Knight moves like lightning _, kicsikém,_ you see _, he would say as rain clanged against the rusted fire ladder and the lightning lit the board like an overeager spotlight._ Two across and one up, two up and one across, this way he hides, you see, he is a clever thief. _All the while she would be more interested in making the knights fight each other, the energy of their battles ebbing and flowing with the crescendos of thunder._ The white knight always wins _, apu. How thrilled she had been, closing his crippled hand over the victorious little horse's head._ The white knight always wins _._

 _The rain falling in marbled swirls onto dirty window panes, its gentle susurrus barely audible over the sound of_ húsleves _bubbling on the stove. Antal grumbling every curse word his schoolboy's imagination, unfettered by his kitchen-bound mother, could think of as Florence put him in check for the fifth time. Faraway thunder masking the low purr of the engine, the long black government car pulling up to the house at its villain's leisure. Two men in suits pounding at the door, demanding to speak to Bodnár Andrásné; Beáta_ néni _crossing herself and snapping at them to get behind the sofa. Low voices, short and sharp, murmuring words she could barely understand, lost to the rush of wind and the death's-head bell throbbing_ Gregor Vassy, Gregor Vassy, Gregor Vassy _,_ gone, gone, gone, _over and over within her head._

 _A nondescript Brooklyn house, small and impersonal and incomplete, the fractured shadow of a dream. Thunder rattling old shutters, never loud enough to drown out the echoes of a man and woman's rage one floor too close. A small, scrawny boy with a wild thatch of curling hair, huddled beneath his bed: eyes twenty years too old, darting and manic, the familiar pond-water brown glossed with tears falling in time to the driving rain; both hands clutching his ears as he stared down at a set board, all pieces placidly in place save one. The white knight stopping his mouth, the old fragile wood splintering between his clenched teeth as he played game after game in his head, the board the only peace when all else around him was at war._

A solitary tear slipped down her cheek as the storm bound past and present together. The grief- for herself, for her father, for Freddie- lingered in hazy corners of her mind like an old bruise, whose locus of pain she couldn't quite pinpoint no matter how hard she prodded. Not that she particularly wished to go about disturbing phantoms long dead and buried. Still, it lingered. Even as the rain retreated to soothing ambience it lingered, and with her hand still entwined with Freddie's she felt no shame in indulging it.

One final flash of lightning, a parting shot of thunder, made her eyes fall shut; suspended in blackness, she could nearly fool herself into thinking the crooked finger tracing the halting path of that tear, a whisper-light brush of skin on skin, was her own. And though she knew he would deny that tender act come morning- indeed, would deny the entirety of the night's fear and weakness- she took up his hand in hers again, and fell asleep smiling as the world fell to silence.

 **This piece of s**t dead ass took me over a month to write. I don't know why, it wasn't even supposed to be this blooming long. Oops.**


End file.
